Allison Bartlett - The Man Who Loved Books Too Much - The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession

I was about to express my doubts about his willingness to make payments, when he rushed forward and confessed.

“I had another little plan behind that, so I essentially did get them free.”

“How?” I asked.

“Well,” he said sheepishly, “I told them I lost my American Express card, and that there were unauthorized charges on it.”

In less than five minutes, Gilkey told me that he had bought a couple of rare books, that he had paid for them in monthly installments—and then that he had not paid a dime. Instead, he had claimed to American Express that the charges were not his.

“Okay,” he said. “I guess they really want me off the phone now.” We said good-bye.

I hung up and wondered if anyone else knew about his American Express scam. The credit card company? The police? Why did he tell me? Why wasn’t he afraid I would notify anyone? Should I? Was I obligated to, legally? I was pleased he had given me this information, but I didn’t want to be in the position of turning him in. I put off making any decisions until I could find out what my obligations were, even though I knew that what bothered me was a matter not only of legal duty but of ethical responsibility. Did I need to tell dealers? Would it do any good, since I had no idea where the books were? I decided it was best to talk to a lawyer before making any decisions.

LATE THAT FALL, I visited Heldfond Book Gallery, one of Gilkey’s victims. I had spoken with Erik Heldfond on the phone, and he suggested I meet with his wife, Lane, since she was the one who had dealt with Gilkey.

When I walked into the store, Lane was helping a couple of British men who appeared to be regulars. I didn’t want to interrupt a possible sale, so I wandered around the store. Most of the books had gorgeous covers, and they sat facing out, rather than spine-to-spine, as if they knew their best sides. That day there was a spectacular first-edition Thunder-ball by Ian Fleming, a copy of The Dial with the first appearance of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land , Richard Avedon’s In the American West , and many first-edition children’s books, such as Green Eggs and Ham , Andersen’s Fairy Tales , Elves and Fairies , Peter Pan and Wendy . From her perch on a chair behind the counter, Lane glanced at me a couple of times with a suspicious look, and I wondered if she thought I might be a shoplifter. When the customers were gone, I approached the counter and introduced myself.

“Remind me what publication you’re from,” she said curtly, looking me up and down. Erik had told her I was working on a story about Gilkey, and she was clearly displeased. “Do you have a business card?”

I explained that I had left my cards in another bag, but that I was writing a story for San Francisco Magazine . She wrote down my name and phone number on a piece of scrap paper next to the cash register. I doubted she needed my number. The gesture seemed to be a way for her to inform me that she was no fool; she intended to look me up.

After Lane gave me the once-over, she reluctantly agreed to talk to me. She recounted the story of Gilkey’s placing the order, how he’d tried to disguise his voice by covering his mouth when he picked up the books, and how she had identified him in the online photo lineup. I knew most of the story already from talking with Detective Munson and Sanders. But they had not communicated to me one key detail: Lane Heldfond was angry. With few exceptions, dealers do not get rich from selling rare books; for most of them, a five-thousand-dollar loss is huge. Three years after the theft, she was still livid with Gilkey, and now it was clear that she was unhappy with me as well.

“What you’re doing, is, well, it might be glorifying him,” she said, noting the publicity that serial killer Charles Manson received: “Everyone knows who he is.”

It was a bit of a stretch, I thought, to link Manson, the murderer, with Gilkey, the book thief, but I knew what she was getting at. They were criminals who received attention she thought unworthy for their deeds.

“This business is a labor of love,” Lane said, and with her hand on her heart, she added, “It gets you here. I feel such anger for this guy.”

Lane didn’t want to talk anymore, so I put my notebook away. But as I was about to walk out the door, she stopped me.

“You know,” she said, “we have really special books here. A lot of book-loving people who come in, they’ve never seen books like this, and chances are, they’ll never see them again for the rest of their lives. We’ve worked hard for fifteen years, first buying eight-dollar books, hoping they’ll go up, then eighty-dollar books, and so on. We’ve worked to build a gem of a shop, something unique. . . . We want these books to be with people who love them, people who pay for them, who appreciate them. . . . Gilkey makes me so angry. You feel violated. When he stole those books, he took them from me, from him,” she said, indicating her husband, and then in a lowered voice, turning for a moment toward her daughter, a dark-eyed, dark-haired girl of nine or ten who was helping her dust the bookshelves, she said, “He took them from her .”

What Heldfond said hit home, not only because of how she and her family had been personally affected by the thefts, but also in how she described what is on her shelves. Those books that we “may never see again for the rest of our lives” are more than just beautiful objects, and their physicality makes their contents seem more meaningful, somehow. Her rage was justified.

I had been thinking about the “thingness” of books ever since my first encounter with the Kräutterbuch and my book fair visit, but something Heldfond had said made me think, too, about the physical book’s place, not just in larger history but in our own personal histories. This was an idea I couldn’t get away from when, several months later, a friend of mine, Andy Kieffer, began extolling the virtues of his e-book. Andy and his wife had each bought an e-book shortly before moving to Guadalajara. They were glad they had, since it’s nearly impossible to find books in English there, and the mail system is unreliable. He found he had no problem reading Chekhov’s The Seagull or Stevenson’s Treasure Island (two texts he recently purchased) on screen instead of between covers, and had now begun carrying the daily New York Times , several issues of The New Yorker , a language dictionary, and some trashy beach reading all on his device at once.

“I never know in advance what I’m going to want to read,” he explained.

Fine for him, I thought. I still couldn’t fathom why anyone who does have easy access to traditional books would make the switch. But then I thought of my teenaged children, both so accustomed to reading from their computers much of the day, not just instant messages and e-mails, but also long articles for homework. They will have no objection to reading e-books. At the same time, though, I think that may only strengthen their attachment to the physical books they do keep. One of my son’s high school graduation presents, something I bought at the last minute, is a black pocket-sized copy of the U.S. Constitution (he’s interested in history and law). Out of all his presents, a laptop for college included, it was this inexpensive, tiny book that my usually reserved son literally held to his heart, saying, “I’m going to keep this forever.” And my daughter now has on her shelf my mother’s (and once my grandmother’s) copies of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables , Anne of the Orchard , and Kilmeny of the Orchard . “When I open those books and start reading, I like thinking about where they have been, who else has read them,” she explained. “It’s like they have more than one story to tell.”